Found you again, Little Mother.
Raine’s lips peeled back, revealing her teeth. She tried and failed to articulate any words in the alien language—her lips and tongue were not designed to speak it—so instead she communicated with it as it had with her, mind to mind. No. You were led here.
No matter. We are here. Hunger, fury, need—you will slake all. Make us ssstrong again as you have grown ssstrong. You will not escape us thisss time. The creature laughed inside her head.
There was no word for how awful that music was. That laughter made her insides shrivel to a singularity and collapse like a dying star. The glee of the creature echoed down with her and Raine was jolted out of her calm, as if she had taken hold of a live wire in her bare hands and—
The world was once more cloaked in a mantle of snow, a screen falling over her vision that sucked her back into the cold realm of memory. She remembered…
* * * * *
The immediate white blinded her, the cold gouged at her cheeks. Blood was a crimson Rorschach test blotting the ivory landscape and Raine knew the blood was hers because it was dripping from her head, which was hanging, lolling upside down.
She reared back and upward; her hair fell into her eyes, heavy with ice, snow, blood and other detritus. She was slung across an extremely broad set of shoulders in a classic fireman’s lift. But the shoulders were misshapen and somehow, well, wrong. They were vile and repulsive in an indescribable fashion. The bones beneath her moved in such a way that some deeply rooted, primitive, reptilian part of her brain woke up and screamed a warning. She dug her hands into what should have been solid flesh, but was instead thick, viscous goop that stuck to her skin like hot tar. It was so repulsive and vile that she gagged. Her hands slid and she scrambled to anchor them in the muck, fearing above all else that her face might fall too close to it. The thing gave no notice to her struggles.
Darting her gaze around, Raine made out other shapes in the blowing snow, though her vision blurred drunkenly, obscuring much needed details. The shapes were humanoid, marching in close formation all around. The snowfall ebbed and she studied her retinue as best she could. The things were bulky, shuffling and monstrously large. Their skin was black as coal, swallowing any light that touched them. They smelled of rotten eggs and fermented fruit, an odor so foul it burned a hole in the air. In the thick mélange of the stink there was also a hint of dead flesh, putrid decay, ancient desiccation. A fecund fetor that contained within it the top notes of carrion, followed by the middle notes of despair, with a base undertone throughout of animalistic fury.
It was the perfume of Hell. The simmering aroma from a cannibal’s kitchen. The spiritual attar of mortal sin.
The realization that she was amongst the reanimated dead came at once and left no room for argument. Instinctively, on a genetic level, she just knew this to be true.
This thing that carried her—it was dead and had been for a very, very long time.
The others around them—they were dead too.
And yet they moved. They breathed, their breath misting in the cold, turning to a clinging fog that stank of brimstone. And their hearts beat in unison. Boom, boom, boom. It was the cacophony of their hearts beating that she had heard in the car. Now it was a roaring tempo beneath her ear, a forceful thrumming that she could feel in her bones and for a dizzying moment, Raine had the mad urge to laugh. It’s the beating of his hideous heart! The urge to laugh turned to a shrieking noise trapped inside her skull. The shrieks carried a tune, a chorus of ghastly voices that she could pick apart if she wished, but it was an exhaustive task, one she quickly ended as soon as she realized she’d undertaken it.
These were the walking dead. And they were nothing like the creatures Hollywood portrayed, nothing she’d been taught to expect. No special effects crew on the planet, with all the money and resources in the world, could produce such indescribably terrifying brutes. These monsters were so alien they transcended imagination and they were real. They were solid. They had her at their mercy.
She was doomed.
No.
No!
Raine didn’t understand how she’d come to be in this mess, or why, but she would not, could not, dare not go without a fight. Before this moment, she had always believed in more than what her eyes told her was real. But until this moment, she had never thought to find the limits of that belief tested to the very edges of their measure. She knew of only two choices before her—give in to despair and die, or fight and retain her humanity, struggle to keep her soul intact. It didn’t matter if she won, it only mattered that she battled to survive.
Something fundamental inside her shifted. Only one who had been faced with complete annihilation could ever understand or empathize, but she realized in that moment that we all leave this world the way we come into it—alone. She determined with all her remaining strength to go out with the largest bang imaginable.
Raine moved with a power and speed she would have thought impossible before this, but her entire world had changed when she’d awakened in the smoking ruin of her car. Everything was different now. A sleeping warrior had awakened within her and it would never go to sleep again until she had checked out of this life and was buried six feet deep.
In a flurry of hysterical, adrenaline-fueled agility, Raine twisted herself free from the thing carrying her. It was the largest of the group, but its mass didn’t slow it down. It grabbed for her with its long arms—arms with more than one elbow joint that allowed it to bend wildly in more than one direction like a whip through the air. Raine ducked swiftly and it missed her, its broken, ragged claws spearing into the tundra-hard ground.
Those knife-sharp nails should have left deep furrows in the earth, left scars in solid stone, but the beast was not of this world. It left no tracks, no trace of itself behind on this plane, save one.
Sound.
The thing grabbed at her again, opening its razor-rimmed jaws wide around a rush of fetid breath and oozing saliva gone yellow with rot and infection. A splash of spittle hit her arm and Raine cried out, the pain of it hot and instantly agonizing. One of the fangs caught her on the meatier part of her forearm, tearing her open from elbow to wrist, raining blood down onto the gathering alabaster snow like red tempera paint.
The cold wind thrust like a fist down Raine’s throat, stuffing her scream into the depths of her, where it remained trapped, a frozen sustain that might never end.
The creature’s mouth opened wider around her arm. All of its teeth came down and Raine was sure she was going to feel it bite through her bones, but it only held her immobile. There in the hot maw of the devil’s mouth, time stood still. Terror took on a whole new meaning. The thing slurped her blood down, and when its teeth hit bone at last, Raine’s scream was free, the wind snatching it away to carry it through the night like the cry of a falling bird.
Raine knew she was going to die.
Alone in the cold, tortured by beasts, the bleak of the blowing white snow over the red of her blood, she was going to die. There would be no music in her ears, not even the rhythm of her own heartbeat over the awful noise of the hungry thing feasting on her flesh. She was going to die without dignity, without much fight, and with a lot of pain.
No. I won’t let this happen. I have fight yet left in me.
Raine’s stubborn will asserted itself, against the agony, against the defeat threatening to overwhelm her, against the odds and against the one who would devour her. It raged, boiling over with a froth of something very much like sunlight. Bright, blinding light. It blinded her sight with fury, with righteous indignation.
“No!” The word became ferocious, but more, it carried with it all the power of her will, which was stronger than any beast. No. She thought the word again and used it like a sword, striking the heart of the cruel thing that had come for her. The heat of her enmity should have set them both on fire.
Instead her enemy simply exploded and Raine herself flew backward with the force of the blast, la
nding flat on her back, losing her breath to the force of the landing.
The violence of the explosion left a bleeding scar on the ground, a wound belching flame that subsided to steam, then ash. The creature was vaporized instantly. A surge of power imbued her with the strength to stand on trembling legs and survey the chaos of the aftermath. The beasts were scattered, their fear real enough to swarm on the air like bone-skipper flies.
Was she strong enough? Did she have the reserves to turn and run?
Absolutely.
The others were coming for her already. There was no time to plot her escape. There was only time to act. Raine dug her feet into the snow and ice and flew, running so hard and so fast into the trees that she didn’t have a chance to look where she was going. Branches lashed at her like an overseer’s whip, drawing blood, bringing more pain. It didn’t matter. So long as she was running away, it was the right direction, the right choice.
In the distance there came the sound of her savior—the plaintive wail of a siren carried to her on a brace of wind.
Yes! Raine employed her finest sense—her hearing—and used the siren as a beacon to guide her back to the roadside. It seemed impossibly far away. The siren was for her much the same as a lighthouse to a ship at sea, guiding her away from dangerous shores. The Doppler effect warped the siren’s noise, but she was almost certain it was coming her way. From behind her in the snow-gray darkness she heard the thunderous pounding of her pursuers’ hearts, but she didn’t hear their footsteps and she took this as a good sign. She dared not look back. Her eyes must strain forward. Her body must fly onward. Raine couldn’t bear to face the unimaginable end again.
The siren wail swelled…freedom loomed…
A clawed hand grabbed her shoulder, a hand so misshapen as to be nothing like a human’s save for the number of digits and presence of a thumb. Raine screamed, her voice bouncing back to her from the dense snowfall in a melody that sounded too like defeat for hope to endure. The siren was closer—it had to be closer. Raine prayed that the flashing lights illuminating the white with a kaleidoscope of color weren’t tricks of her timorous mind.
Lancing pain shot through her entire body as the creature’s claws tightened and tore a hole in her flesh, then she was free again. She stumbled, but dared not stop running. A disturbance in the air made a whistle behind her, then the talons found their purchase, opening the gash in her arm wider. Her arm, already slippery with blood, sprayed an arterial shower of rubies. She didn’t want to think about what deadly pathogens coated the nasty claws or what deadly poisons might be entering her bloodstream where they sliced through her skin. Raine only wanted freedom from this madness, this unrelenting, primitive fear and pain.
It was not to be.
The thing had her now. She couldn’t free herself of its hold this time. It doggedly pulled her backward, its arms coming around in a fierce bear hug. Though she instinctively dug her heels into the ground, it didn’t matter. The beast was illimitably strong. The other creatures now crowded around her and there were claws everywhere on her arms, shoulders and legs. One long scythe-like nail skewered her collarbone and it was over. It rooted in her muscle, glancing off bone. Raine was in so much pain now it was staggering. The world wobbled in her vision, she was lifted once more, held aloft on the monsters’ shoulders, carried back into the forest on soundless feet.
She screamed for help but the wind stole her voice…
The wound in her arm was a conflagration of pure agony, made worse now by the injury in her shoulder. The agony was so immense, so consuming that Raine could not wrap her head around it. It transcended physical suffering and lumbered away at the foundations of her soul.
But she could still reason, she could still think—if only in spurts of illogical nonsense—around the agony. Her will was formidable. Raine knew she would die here. How she would die was important. It was all that mattered anymore. She chose to die fighting. Better to die fighting.
At first she flopped on the things’ shoulders. Her muscles didn’t seem to want to work. After several tries she managed to work the bones and muscles of her neck. She turned her head and bit the closest target, sinking her teeth in so hard and so deep that her jaws popped.
Her first thought, as her teeth met in the middle, was poison.
Raine had poisoned herself. She was absolutely certain of it.
The blood that filled her mouth burned through her like acid.
Spitting, frantic to do some damage before she died either from blood loss or toxic shock, she ripped the meat from the bone and saw a waterfall of the creature’s blood spray the ground. It was as black as crude oil. It melted the snow with a steaming hiss and threatened to melt her insides just as easily. No matter how hard she spit, she inevitably swallowed traces of that horrible blood and it blazed a path down her throat, into her stomach, where it bloomed into a flower of smoke. Her entire body convulsed so vigorously that she broke the creatures’ holds and was free again.
Her back cracked as it struck the ground, but her will was indomitable and she willed herself to get up.
It was a miracle but she managed it.
She gathered every bit of self-control in her possession and stumbled onward with all the speed her muscles had left. It wasn’t much. Raine lost a few moments to dizzying darkness, to cold and discordant notes of screaming banshee monsters, but then somehow she was on her feet and running again. Sprinting. Stumbling and rambling incoherently, but all the same, sprinting through the trees.
Raine was desperately straining to hear the wail of the beckoning siren and the call to salvation. Drowning in an ocean of pain, Raine vomited while she ran, her only concession to the convulsion a slight bending at the waist. No way in hell did she pause to study the horrifying contents of her stomach; she kept running through the trees because she couldn’t stop. Would never…ever…willingly…stop.
There were definitely strobing lights stabbing the darkness ahead. It was no longer true night—Raine had somehow made it to the other side of midnight. The darkness of the pinewood forest canopy spat her out and she half-slid, half-fell into the deeper snow outside it. Dawn would break in but a few hours—and there was a comfort in that certainty. The world was still spinning through space and she with it.
Raine surged ahead, seeking the colorful lights, hope granting her a sudden wellspring of strength. “I’m down here. Help!” She panted, and with the last of her air she roared. “Help me, somebody please!”
The steep incline leading up to the roadside loomed large in her horizon. She made it to the rise and began her ascent. Desperation lent her a mad edge that refuted the absolute certainty that she could not climb the hillside without sliding back down into the waiting claws of the monsters. She had to try. She had to—
Chapter Five
Do something.
Raine blinked and the snow was gone. The vivid memory faded and reality sharpened into the present. Now, once more, she faced a foe that came from beyond any previously imaginable horror. This ghastly creature, this Daemon, was calling others of its ilk. While she stood here ruminating the Daemon was using its hive mind to summon its brethren here to face her. There wasn’t much time.
These beasts could Travel.
Raine glanced in the direction where she thought Grimm waited, but he was so well concealed by shadow that she could glean no trace of him in the darkness. Not even a ripple of his cloak betrayed him. She was left to her own devices, but she suspected Grimm had his eye on her and every confidence that she would have no need of him. It was a significant gesture that let her know she had some measure of control over this absurd situation, even if she did not yet understand what it was. How did he do that—inspire such self-confidence, even though she hardly knew him?
She blinked and suddenly there were half a dozen more Daemons come to the aid of their kin. Raine still experienced no fear, only a detached curiosity at its complete absence within her. Then, with a sizzling start of realization, somehow, imp
ossibly she understood.
No matter how many of these impossible creations descended upon her, it was she who held the power here.
No longer was she the hapless, injured girl on the roadside, a vulnerable target for the endless appetites of these brutes. Raine was no longer a weak and defenseless victim. Now Raine was powerful, uninjured, whole and unfettered by fear. She had her strength and she possessed a weapon these creatures feared—she was certain of it, the same way she’d known Grimm’s home was underground. Now she just had to figure out what the weapon was.
Such strange disturbances in the air, those cords all but screaming at her for attention. If she could just pluck at them like the strings of a guitar or cello, she’d understand them better. Raine had never met an instrument she could not play…
The shimmering heat, the translucent substance in the air had grown from one to seven separate threads of connection, a binding relay from her heart to theirs. They were ethereal, floating like the many arms of a man-o-war, but what were they exactly? What means did they serve?
Was this a music she could play?
Such lovely cords, what music would they make if they did belong to an instrument?
Raine decided then and there that she would make this music hers. She reached out, ran her fingers over the shimmering threads—strumming them like she’d imagined doing, testing them.
The buzzing in her ears shrieked into raw, sizzling electricity. Tears spurted from her eyes, hot as lava. She couldn’t see through them, her eyes rolling into the back of her head like a lobotomy patient under the work of a clumsy surgeon, watching the tool at work on her brain. The noise spread from her head down to her heart, burning through her like a fever.
Yes!
Blind, wincing around the jaw-shattering screeching in the air, she wrapped her fingers around the cords, gathering them together until they cut through her throbbing hands like barbed-wire heartbeats. Her whole mouth hummed as if she were touching her tongue to 9-volt batteries. Raine’s breath came in quick, shallow gasps, as if she’d been dunked into freezing water and her lungs had suddenly shrunk. Her head was a hot-air balloon that might suddenly float away. Giddy with dark humor, she yanked the threads as hard as she could.
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